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So you say your game has strategy
author=kentona
Battles are about identifying patterns and then adapting to that pattern. In fact, that pretty much summarizes all games.
Just make sure that your bosses have an identifiable pattern and you'll probably be okay.
Sure, you do want identifiable patterns, else the player can't really form any strategy and it end up being entirely a contest of if his characters are powerful enough. However, the problem is doing all that while not making the patterns to easily adaptable.
Character Introductions - Short and sweet or explanatory?
I'll also echo "short".
Here's the deal, you can not hook the player by a long story. You need to hook the player with your character's mannerism, the situations the character gets into and how she/he handles those situations. Trying to get a players interest with a long movie is a poor move.
Here's the deal, you can not hook the player by a long story. You need to hook the player with your character's mannerism, the situations the character gets into and how she/he handles those situations. Trying to get a players interest with a long movie is a poor move.
So you say your game has strategy
I believe in sticking to simple components (use accurate skills and weapons against evasive enemies, etc) and achieving the complexity by giving the player a lot of things he need to do. Against bosses, you need to heal the damage you taken, do something to mitigate the damage from further attacks and you still need to keep the pressure up since you will run out of MP if you turtle to much. Some bosses also have gimmicks thrown in in addition to that.
Cannon fodder enemies will be a bit simpler, but you still need to have both a strong offensive and a strong defensive strategy and you want it to be as economic as reasonable possible. Each character recovers 15% (subject to change) of their max MP each time you win a battle, so that's how much you can use without eventually running out of resources.
Anyway, now to clever tricks the player can use.
Many enemies have a stamina bar that fills up every turn, but decreases if they use strong attacks. This means that enemies who happened to choose weak attacks will have more stamina and can use more powerful attacks than enemies who already consumed their stamina. You can take advantage of that and disable or kill enemies with high stamina first, thereby denying them the chance to use their strongest attacks.
You can throw out defenses that are very effective against some enemies and disable or kill the enemies who can get past that defense.
There are various tanking moves that are efficient for different situations (attract attention and raise defense, attract attention and raise evasion, for example) and you can do things to help creating those situations.
There are a lot of offensive moves you can use efficiently assuming you can plan forward. For example, empowered spells will deal more damage than unempowered spells, but they prevent you from casting spells in three turns. If you know that your character won't need to cast another spell in those three turns, the empowered spells will be very useful.
Cannon fodder enemies will be a bit simpler, but you still need to have both a strong offensive and a strong defensive strategy and you want it to be as economic as reasonable possible. Each character recovers 15% (subject to change) of their max MP each time you win a battle, so that's how much you can use without eventually running out of resources.
Anyway, now to clever tricks the player can use.
Many enemies have a stamina bar that fills up every turn, but decreases if they use strong attacks. This means that enemies who happened to choose weak attacks will have more stamina and can use more powerful attacks than enemies who already consumed their stamina. You can take advantage of that and disable or kill enemies with high stamina first, thereby denying them the chance to use their strongest attacks.
You can throw out defenses that are very effective against some enemies and disable or kill the enemies who can get past that defense.
There are various tanking moves that are efficient for different situations (attract attention and raise defense, attract attention and raise evasion, for example) and you can do things to help creating those situations.
There are a lot of offensive moves you can use efficiently assuming you can plan forward. For example, empowered spells will deal more damage than unempowered spells, but they prevent you from casting spells in three turns. If you know that your character won't need to cast another spell in those three turns, the empowered spells will be very useful.
Willa & Rott: An unnatural tale of a girl and her dog
Introducting characters: too soon or too late?
author=ubermax
So far there's eight playable characters, so it's not like the player will feel like they're lacking something huge. And other characters can learn black magic, just not as well or as fast as she can. I guess it's just a question of timing, and whether or not the game can stand to hold off on her arrival for a few more hours of game play.
In that case there should be no problem in introducing the black mage later.
No save marathon game. Good or bad idea?
author=PsychoFreaX
I was thinking of this game to be something that you play during the holidays or something. When you're bored with too much free time and it's raining outside. You know. Thought the marathon challenge makes up for the fact that it's a short gam- wait wha? 10 hours wouldn't be considered short?
A lot of people actually enjoy the free time from holidays, rainy days or not. Even if they're bored, chance is they don't consider a 10 hour marathon to be the best cure. The problem with most activities is that they become less fun the more you do them, therefore you to switch activity when one get boring. So, your game may be fun the first few hours, but chance is that after that, it's your game they are bored of.
Some people choose to undertake a game marathon. However, those who don't are unlikely to be open to the idea that they should do it because of whatever pro marathon argument you make. I for example, would rather play a game for say 2-3 hours and then look elsewhere for entertainment, than playing the game for another 7-8 hours.
10 hours is short for an RPG, but long for playing on one sitting.
No save marathon game. Good or bad idea?
I would recommend soft saves instead of disabling saves. Many people don't have enough free time for this kind of thing. Other people are simple bored outa their minds after even half that time.
Battle lengths
For the current project I'm working on, I'm aiming for a 4 turn average for cannon fodder encounters.
If the battle is shorter, a lot of strategies will become useless. For example, putting an enemy to sleep prevents it from attacking you, but so does killing it. The advantage with sleep is that you only need one action to disable them while killing them requires whatever number of hits it takes to kill them. If they die to quickly, the advantage of using sleep instead of killing them becomes less. The same goes for all defensive actions.
Indirect offense will also become useless with to short battles. Poisoned enemies need to live enough turns for the HP drain to matter. If you cast a buff that increases someone's attack, you spend one turn that otherwise could have been used to deal damage. The buffed character has to get off enough attacks to regain the lost damage. For example, if an attack buff makes you deal 1,5 times the damage you would unbuffed, it takes two turns of attacking with that buff to break even and three turns to gain damage.
On the other hand, if battles last to long, the player starts repeating himself for that same battle. For any effect that wears off, say silence which is cured after three turns, the player will most likely enter an X turn loop where every X'th turn he recasts skill Y. For effects that doesn't wear off, the player will be done with them after the first, or first two, turns and just attack instead. Either means a lot of repetition.
How long battles should last will depend on how the battle system, skills, characters and a lot more, is set up. For example, the attack buff in my example wouldn't need three turns to pay if you have a support character with a crappy damage output. Also, if you have a system where the player does attack and defense more or less simultaneously, you need less turns. Pick as many turns as your system need.
If the battle is shorter, a lot of strategies will become useless. For example, putting an enemy to sleep prevents it from attacking you, but so does killing it. The advantage with sleep is that you only need one action to disable them while killing them requires whatever number of hits it takes to kill them. If they die to quickly, the advantage of using sleep instead of killing them becomes less. The same goes for all defensive actions.
Indirect offense will also become useless with to short battles. Poisoned enemies need to live enough turns for the HP drain to matter. If you cast a buff that increases someone's attack, you spend one turn that otherwise could have been used to deal damage. The buffed character has to get off enough attacks to regain the lost damage. For example, if an attack buff makes you deal 1,5 times the damage you would unbuffed, it takes two turns of attacking with that buff to break even and three turns to gain damage.
On the other hand, if battles last to long, the player starts repeating himself for that same battle. For any effect that wears off, say silence which is cured after three turns, the player will most likely enter an X turn loop where every X'th turn he recasts skill Y. For effects that doesn't wear off, the player will be done with them after the first, or first two, turns and just attack instead. Either means a lot of repetition.
How long battles should last will depend on how the battle system, skills, characters and a lot more, is set up. For example, the attack buff in my example wouldn't need three turns to pay if you have a support character with a crappy damage output. Also, if you have a system where the player does attack and defense more or less simultaneously, you need less turns. Pick as many turns as your system need.
Button Mash - Forcing the player to use different skills
author=Zephyr
I liked this idea, but with a twist. It seems somewhat closer to reality. It's similar to if you would always be hacking-slashing forward, you'd let your guard down more and more. This would make it easier for enemies to land a critical. But instead of making a pure Attack & Guard, you could give "Offensive" and "Defensive" values to each move that would be worn out or enforced. The less offensive you use, the faster Defensive will recover. Keep using the Offensive moves that would deal more damage and you would leave yourself more vulnerable.
That system can work, but you need a "less, but tougher battles" approach for it. The system will fail against enemies that are defeated in a few turns. The reason for that is because as your defense weakens, the enemies become less and less. At the second turn, your defense will be weaker if you used an offensive move, but if at that point you killed an enemy, there will be one less that hits you.
By the way, similar restrictions exist for most ideas. They only work when certain conditions are true. It's actually very common that an RPGM project (or even commercial games) has some very fun ideas, but they just don't work since the game doesn't supplement them.
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